Rockettes Tradition, Set Free by a ‘Banshee Artist’

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From left, Karen Keeler, associate choreographer for the Rockettes’ “New York Spectacular,” the choreographer Mia Michaels, and the assistant choreographer Katie Walker.CreditRebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

By Rebecca Milzoff

June 9, 2016

It is easy to feel small in Radio City Music Hall. On a recent weekday afternoon, at a tech rehearsal for the Rockettes’ “New York Spectacular,” the world’s largest proscenium arch dwarfed the dancers, who looked less glamazon than usual in their practice leggings and tank tops. But at the soundboard, the choreographer Mia Michaels seemed in no way intimidated. “It’s so cool to have Radio City as my playground,” she whispered. “It’s a really big playground!”

For Ms. Michaels, Radio City is the biggest of the many big stages on which she has worked. In recent years, hers has become one of the most recognizable faces of commercial contemporary dance, largely through her Emmy-winning, ultraphysical and expressive choreography for Fox television’s “So You Think You Can Dance.” She has choreographed movies; stage shows for pop stars; and a Broadway musical, “Finding Neverland.” Now, Ms. Michaels is directing and choreographing Radio City’s “New York Spectacular,” which opens on Wednesday, June 15, and is to run for eight weeks.

“It was one of those things where I was like: How do the Rockettes and Mia Michaels go together?” she said over coffee later that week. “I’m this banshee artist. I’m wild, I’m always looking for the thing that hasn’t been done. And then you have this brand that’s very traditional, very ‘this is what it is.’ ”

Ms. Michaels worked with the Rockettes before, briefly. After choreographing “Finding Neverland,” she was invited to create the opening number, set to Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York,” for the 2015 “New York Spring Spectacular.” (Warren Carlyle choreographed the rest.)

The “New York Spring Spectacular” wasn’t a critical success (Charles Isherwood called it a “numbingly overblown 90-minute infomercial” in his review for The New York Times), but focus-group research showed that Ms. Michaels’s number was a hit. “It was a natural progression to ask her to come back for the whole show,” said Colin Ingram, executive vice president of Madison Square Garden Productions, which produces the Radio City Spectaculars.

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The choreographer Mia Michaels.CreditRebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

The new version is Radio City’s latest effort to mount a successful counterpart to its annual Christmas show. The 2015 “New York Spring Spectacular” emerged from “Heart and Lights,” a show that was postponed, then canceled. The “New York Spectacular,” in turn, is a reimagining of the “New York Spring Spectacular.” Audience feedback from that show had asked for an increased Rockette presence, and Mr. Ingram and his team expect Ms. Michaels’s entirely new choreography — her “Welcome to New York” number remains, though updated — to show the dancers in a new light. (“We’re very focused on customers’ feedback,” Mr. Ingram said when asked about how focus groups affected a show’s development. “We’ve got this community of fans, and of course we want to listen to them.”)

The hope is to also appeal to a different, slightly wider audience. “We’ve shifted the demographic a bit from a younger child and family to a preteen audience,” Mr. Ingram said. “We see these wonderful athletic ladies with a bit of sass and sexiness. I think people who enjoy contemporary work and more pop culture will enjoy it.”

Ms. Michaels has had experience with theatrical spectacles before: In 2002, the Italian-Belgian director Franco Dragone, known for his work with Cirque du Soleil, picked her to choreograph Céline Dion’s Las Vegas show, “A New Day.” Working with Mr. Dragone was like “sitting next to Fellini,” she said. Before that, she was “a choreographer’s choreographer — the vocabulary and complexity of movement, those were my main goals. Franco said: ‘No, no. You need to understand the eye of a child, the simplicity of how to open things up in space, so it becomes like visual candy.’”

Those lessons came in handy for the “New York Spectacular.” Along with plenty of technical razzle-dazzle (immersive video projections, a booming soundtrack), the show has at its center a story told from a child’s point of view. (Mr. Ingram said one goal was “to strengthen the dramatic thread”; the book is by Douglas Carter Beane, a playwright whose credits include “The Little Dog Laughed” and “Xanadu”).

A couple who once lived in New York come back to show it to their children but become separated from them at Grand Central Terminal. The kids — a bratty, iPhone-obsessed girl and her younger brother — follow their parents’ itinerary through New York, with a little help from famous statues (George M. Cohan, Alice in Wonderland) brought to life by the brother’s imagination.

Stylistically, Ms. Michaels is something of a gamble for this show. While the Rockettes are known for their streamlined look and control, Ms. Michaels’s movement celebrates awkwardness (“Genius lives in the awkward,” she says) and a sense of breaking free — an impulse, she says, that originated in her childhood, when she wore braces to fix her turned-in hips.

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The choreographer Mia Michaels, center, at rehearsals for the Rockettes’ summer “New York Spectacular.”CreditRebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

“I like sickled feet, where the foot almost looks broken,” Ms. Michaels said. “I love shoulders pulled up to the ears. And I hate bevels” — the neutral Rockettes pose, with the standing leg slightly turned out and the opposite knee drawn to the center, giving the impression of one elongated leg.

Her process, too, is somewhat unpredictable. The Rockettes are accustomed to quickly picking up clean, finished choreography, but Ms. Michaels fine-tunes from beginning to end. In January, she began relating her movement to Karen Keeler, the director of Rockettes creative and the associate choreographer for the “New York Spectacular,” and to the assistant choreographer Katie Walker. Once a number was, for the moment, set, Ms. Keeler and Ms. Walker would then workshop it on 18 Rockettes, going back to Ms. Michaels for further adjustments before transferring it to the full lineup of 36 dancers.

“Mia works from the inside out,” Ms. Keeler said. “And my job is the exact opposite — I have to be the voice of reason, dealing with the logistics and how the Rockettes formations can work, how the movement can have the breadth she wants, but also have the precision we’re known for.”

Lindsay Howe, a Rockette of 14 years, recalled that while creating “Money,” the number the Rockettes were rehearsing on that recent afternoon — set on Wall Street and scored with a sinister remix of “Money Makes the World Go ’Round” — Ms. Michaels stopped rehearsal. “She went, ‘Wait — I would be disappointed if I got this far into a number, and I didn’t see a kick. But we’re gonna make it a Mia kick,’” Ms. Howe recalled. “So she added this giant développé whack! Clearly she’s thinking about creating for us as Rockettes but making it new and fresh.”

Ms. Michaels said she had learned plenty herself, noting that even on a stage as large as Radio City’s, coordinating 36 dancers requires her to find inspiration in constraint. “Put me in a box, and I’m going to create something in every single angle and inch of that box,” she said. “You will never know you’re in a box by the end of it. Because I don’t believe in boxes.”

The end product, she said, is “two extremes marrying each other,” the structure of the Rockettes rubbing off on Ms. Michaels, her own twists on dance norms enlivening the Rockettes’ routine.

“I didn’t go in there to change the brand,” Ms. Michaels said. “I went in to try and infuse it with some new energy and life and vocabulary. These are 36 powerful, beautiful women who are much more than just a kick line.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: The Rockettes Tradition, Set Free by a ‘Banshee’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe